Wednesday, February 4, 2015

I’m thinking of a
fictional story by an English male author with great name recognition, a story that
has received great acclaim in the English country house upstairs/downstairs
genre, and that has all of the following specific elements:

ONE: A man is murdered who
has been at the country house.

TWO: The murder is
committed a few years after the end of WWI.

THREE: Suspicion is cast
on one or more of the main characters at the country house.

FOUR: The apparent murder
victim appears to be a disruptive figure.

FIVE: A main character
deeply involved in the murder mystery is named Tony Gillingham.

SIX: There is a main
character who meets all four of the following criteria:

His first name is Matthew and his last
name begins with C and ends in ”ley”;

He has an older cousin named Robert;

He is related to the owner of the country
house family estate where the action occurs; and

He is or might be in the line of
inheritance of the estate .

SEVEN: There is a main
character at the country house who is extremely Iago-like in his manipulativeness
and expertise at exploitation of foibles in other characters, and who expresses
the anger and bitterness which motivates him, most saliently in relation to the
murder mystery.

EIGHT: Description of action
in this story has been posted during the past week in the Janeites & Austen
L groups.

So…..what is the title of
the story?;)

ANSWER(S) TO THE QUIZ

I received one answer-a
correct answer--from Jane S. Fox, in the Janeites group:

“By A. A. Milne of all
people but the title escapes me. Red
Manor?”

Bravo, Jane! The title of
the novel is The Red House Mystery.
A.A. Milne (of course most famous for creating Winnie the Pooh and friends) wrote
this, his one and only detective story, in 1922. Before I run through my Quiz points, and show
how they all apply to BOTH Downton Abbey AND
The Red House Mystery (with massive spoilers
as to the latter), I want to first acknowledge novelist and blogger Maya
Corrigan, who, two weeks ago, wrote the following post:

“Children's author A.A.
Milne, creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, also wrote a detective novel. An odd
connection exists between Milne's The Red House Mystery and Downton Abbey. The bones of the classic British
mystery are on display in Milne's book: the English country house setting; a crime investigated by an amateur; a sidekick; a locked-room puzzle; a whodunit
with clues that play fair with the reader.

The book opens "below
stairs" . . .The housekeeper and a parlor maid discuss the arrival of the
host’s long-lost brother, the disruptive stranger amid the guests already at
the house. The murder is investigated by a gentleman sleuth named Tony
Gillingham.

Aha. Tony Gillingham is
also the name of Mary’s suitor in Downton Abbey and the man whose
rapist-valet died last season in an “accident.” Is the choice of the man's name
a coincidence? I wonder. Julian Fellowes, Downton Abbey’s creator and
writer, is certainly familiar with British mysteries from the same era as
Milne's. Fellowes wrote the country house mystery Gosford Park and has a
screenplay for Agatha Christie’s The Crooked House in the works.
Fellowes says “murder in a genteel setting” never goes stale. Downton
Abbey was originally conceived as a spin-off of Gosford Park. Though
the series went in another direction, the remnants of that initial idea remain
in the suspicious deaths that affect upstairs and downstairs at Downton. So
will the Tony Gillingham in Downton Abbey follow in the footsteps
of his namesake? Will he try to unravel the mystery surrounding his valet’s
death? “ END QUOTE

It was 2 days ago that I serendipitously
discovered the Downton Abbey connection
to The Red House Mystery, and then
Googled and found Maya Corrigan’s earlier post. My serendipity lay in Ellen
Moody having posted the text of a 1950 essay by Raymond Chandler entitled “The
Simple Art of Murder”. As I was reading it, without any thought of Downton Abbey, my eye was arrested halfway
through Chandler’s description of Milne’s novel:“The detective in the case is an insouciant
gent named Antony Gillingham, a nice lad with a cheery eye, a cozy little flat
in London, and that airy manner.”

I was instantly certain that
Julian Fellowes’s suave “Tony Gillingham” MUST be derived, at least in part,
from Milne’s “insouciant gent Anthony Gillingham”, and that’s when Google led
me to Maya Corrigan’s blog post. That, in turn, encouraged me to do the
sleuthing which quickly led me to find the multiple points of correspondence
which I will now outline, as I now run through the double answers to each of my
Quiz points:

ONE: A man is murdered who
has been at the country house.

DT: The rapist valet
Green.

RHM: Mark Alblett is shot
by his cousin Matthew Cayley.

TWO: The murder is
committed a few years after the end of WWI.

DT & RHM: Obvious in
both.

THREE: Suspicion is cast
on one or more of the main characters at the country house.

DT & RHM: Obvious in
both.

FOUR: The apparent murder
victim appears to be a disruptive figure.

DT: The valet Green rapes
Anna while at Downton Abbey.

RHM: The victim, Mark
Ablett, is murdered while in disguise as his long lost brother Robert Ablett,
whom Mark has spoken of as a ne’er-do-well who went off to Australia.

FIVE: A main character
deeply involved in the murder mystery is named Tony Gillingham.

DT: The murder victim
Green was Tony Gillingham’s valet.

RHM: Tony Gillingham is
the amateur sleuth who solves the murder mystery.

SIX: There is a main
character who meets all four of the following criteria:

His first name is Matthew and his last
name begins with C and ends in ”ley”;

He has an older cousin named Robert;

He is related to the owner of the country
house family estate where the action occurs; and

He is or might be in the line of
inheritance of the estate .

DT: Matthew Crawley is the
younger cousin of Robert Crawley, Lord Grantham, patriarch of Downton Abbey,
but then Matthew inherits Downton Abbey.

RHM: Matthew Cayley is the
younger cousin of Mark Ablett, owner of the Red House, and they are the last
survivors of the Cayley family, so Matthew would have inherited the Red House
after he murdered Mark.

SEVEN: There is a main
character at the country house who is extremely Iago-like in his manipulativeness
and expertise at exploitation of foibles in other characters, and who expresses
the anger and bitterness which motivates him, most saliently in relation to the
murder mystery.

…I am
certain that Fellowes has been consistently modeling Thomas Barrow on the
character of Iago from Othello.

RHM: Like
Iago, Matthew Cayley manipulates his narcissistic elder cousin Mark Ablett,
after first insinuating himself into the role of indispensable Man Friday to his
elder cousin, and then eggs Mark on to play a trick on others by impersonating
his own (dead) brother, which trick provides Matthew with the necessary cover
for what he hopes will be a foolproof murder. I.e., Mark trusts Matthew the same way Othello trusts Iago, and Matthew
causes Mark’s death just as Iago causes Othello’s death.

EIGHT: Description of action
in this story has been posted during the past week in the Janeites & Austen
L groups.

See above, re the
serendipitous posting by Ellen Moody of Raymond Chandler’s essay which alerted
me to Fellowes’s sly allusion.

DISCUSSION RE IAGO IN
MILNE & FELLOWES:

Surely these extensive points
of correspondence will lay to rest any reasonable doubt that Fellowes was
indeed covertly alluding to Milnes’s novel, and it is indeed fitting and
delightful that Fellowes chooses the year of Milne’s novel as the year in which
Green is murdered.

But, aside from the fun of
detecting Fellowes’s clever and multi-layered in-joke, hidden in plain sight
for the pleasure of those who might recognize in Fellowes’s murder mystery as
an homage to Milne’s, the real takeaway for me (and, I believe, for all
dedicated Downton Abbey viewers) from
all of this is Quiz Point Seven.

I find it an extremely
strong additional corroboration of my claims that Barrow has been intended by
Fellowes, from the very first episode of the show to the present, to be
recognized by the knowing viewer as the Iago of Downton Abbey.

And there’s more, much
more, where that came from. It turns out that Milne’s novel contains the
following two EXPLICIT references to Othello,
both in the confession by Matthew at the end, shortly before he kills
himself:

"You will say that it
was impossible to do the thing thoroughly enough. I answer again that you never
knew Mark. He was being what he wished most to be—an artist. No OTHELLO ever blacked
himself all over with such enthusiasm as did Mark.”

“…Oh, just tell me one
thing. Why did Mark tell Miss Norbury about his imaginary brother?”

“That’s puzzled me rather,
too, Bill. It may be that he was just doing the OTHELLO business-painting
himself black all over. I mean he may have been so full of his appearance as
Robert that he had almost got to believe in Robert, and had to tell
everybody..”

And, guess what—Othello had
been on Milne’s brain for quite a while when he wrote The Red House Mystery....Milne’s 1922 novel itself is a revisiting
of his own 1915 short story “The Actor”, which is about a small town actor who is
playing Othello when chance brings a theatre impresario to the hotel where he
works, and that is his big break as an actor.

Turns out that Mark
Ablett, the murder victim, had been a small town actor himself:

"I don't know if
Beverley has told you about Mark's acting. He was an amateur of all the arts,
and vain of his little talents, but as an actor he seemed to himself most
wonderful. Certainly he had some ability for the stage, so long as he had the
stage to himself and was playing to an admiring audience. As a professional
actor in a small part he would have been hopeless; as an amateur playing the leading
part, he deserved all that the local papers had ever said about him. And so the
idea of giving us a private performance, directed against a professional
actress who had made fun of him, appealed equally to his vanity and his desire
for retaliation. If he, Mark Ablett, by his wonderful acting could make Ruth
Norris look a fool in front of the others, could take her in, and then join in
the laugh at her afterwards, he would indeed have had a worthy revenge!”

And, by the way, that leads to yet another
broad wink at Milne’s fiction from Fellowes----that impressario’s name in his
short story just happens to be LEVINski (a Jewish name, very much like LEVINson,
Cora’s maiden name in Downton Abbey!).
So Fellowes has apparently been a
serious enough scholar to have connected Milne’s novel to Milne’s obscure prior
short story!

And here’s the final
takeaway of all of the above. It’s not just an esoteric literary game to be
played only by literary sleuths like myself. I remain confident that Fellowes
has been playing fair with this veiled allusion to Milne and Shakespeare, and
that, sooner or later, in Season 6 if not later in Season 5……

….Julian Fellowes is going
to spring his own carefully laid five-year trap on the viewers of Downton Abbey, and show us how Thomas
Barrow, his Iago, somehow, some way, carefully planned and instigated the
murder of Green, and then worked, meticulously, tirelessly, and creatively, to
frame Bates for that murder!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: As a delightful additional
touch, Julian Fellowes is, I am sure, well aware that there is, not far from Highclere
Castle, the great estate where Downton
Abbey is filmed, a “lovely country pub” called…..the “Red House”!:

“The Red House of the
title is a country cottage owned by Mark Ablett. As the novel opens, we find
Ablett entertaining a handful of guests, among them the young Bill Beverley. At
breakfast one morning, Ablett announces to his guests – as well as his cousin Cayley,
who plays the roles of secretary, confidante and business advisor – that his
brother, the wastrel Robert, has returned from his 15-year exile in Australia
and will be visiting the Red House that very afternoon. When Robert arrives,
the guests are off playing golf, and only Mark, Cayley and the servants are
present in the house. A shot rings out just as Anthony Gillingham arrives to
visit his friend, Beverley, and along with Cayley, he finds Robert dead, lying
on the floor of the office, and Mark nowhere to be seen.

In some ways, The Red
House Mystery is an homage to the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with
Gillingham taking on the role of Sherlock Holmes to Beverley’s ever-eager
Watson. As the plot unfolds and we gain more information, Gillingham walks us
through a number of equally plausible theories, and we learn the secrets that
the Red House holds at the same time as our amateur sleuths. In other ways, the
book is a playful satire of the entire mystery genre – Bill’s boyish keenness
about the matter at hand, Gillingham – a man with a photographic memory –
falling accidentally into the role of sleuth, and still managing to outthink
not only the murderer but the police as well – but Milne manages to avoid
cliche, despite the hidden passage and an abundance, of Christie proportions,
of suspects.

When the final reveal
comes, it’s not entirely unexpected, and sharp-eyed readers will have picked up
on the clues Milne scatters throughout the story, but it’s no less satisfying a
book for that – the joy of this novel comes more from the journey than the
destination, and Milne provides us with a cast of likeable characters and an
interesting enough mystery to keep us entertained throughout this light and
entertaining whodunit.”

1 comment:

Arnie, Thank you for the shout-out to my blog post. Your exploration of the many links between Downton Abbey and Milne's mystery was fascinating. We share an enthusiasm for Shakespeare, Austen, and NY Times crossword puzzles. I look forward to reading your other posts and your book when it comes out.Maya Corriganmayacorrigan.com

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A lovely bit of praise from my youngest (at heart) supporter in Seattle:

"...Two sessions were outstanding: Juliet McMasters on the more subtle, deeper meanings of "Northanger Abbey" and a Darcy-like young lawyer, Arnie Perlstein, who revealed his very plausible theory that the "shadow story" behind much of Jane Austen's work is the horror of multiple childbirth and women's deaths. I am a Jane-Austen-as-feminist person and this really resonated with me!"

Thank you, Mary!

"Arnie's theories [about Austen and Shakespeare] may strain credulity, but so much the greater his triumph if they turn out to have persuasive force after they are properly presented and maturely considered. That is what publication is all about"

"When great or unexpected events fall out upon the stage of this sublunary world—the mind of man, which is an inquisitive kind of a substance, naturally takes a flight behind the scenes to see what is the cause and first spring of them."--Tristram Shandy

About Me

I'm a 65 year old independent scholar (still) working on a book project about the SHADOW STORIES of Jane Austen's novels (and Shakespeare's plays). I first read Austen in 1995, an American male real estate lawyer, i.e., a Janeite outsider. I therefore never "learned" that there was no secret subtext in her novels. All I did was to closely read and reread her novels, while participating in stimulating online group readings. Then, in 2002, I whimsically wondered whether Willoughby stalked Marianne Dashwood and staged their “accidental” meeting. I retraced his steps, followed the textual “bread crumbs”, and verified my hunch. I've since made numerous similar discoveries about offstage scheming by various characters. In hindsight, it was my luck not only to be a lawyer, but also a lifelong solver of NY Times and other difficult American crossword puzzles. These both trained me to spot complex patterns based on fragmentary data, to interpret cryptic clues of all kinds, and, above all, not to give up until I’ve completed the puzzle--and literary sleuthing Jane Austen's novels (and Shakespeare's plays) is, bar none, the best puzzle solving in the world!